Low-Frequency Black-Box Backdoor Attack via Evolutionary Algorithm

Yanqi Qiao, Dazhuang Liu, Rui Wang, Kaitai Liang; Proceedings of the Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2025, pp. 7571-7581

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) that have excelled in diverse computer vision tasks are vulnerable to backdoor attacks enabling attacker-controlled predictions via specific triggers. Restricted to spatial domains recent research exploits perceptual traits by embedding triggers in the frequency domain yielding pixel-level indistinguishable perturbations. In black-box settings restricted access to model and training process necessitates advanced trigger designs. Current frequency-based attacks manipulate magnitude spectra introducing discrepancies between clean and poisoned data though vulnerable to common image processing operations like compression and filtering. In this paper we propose a robust low-frequency backdoor attack (LFBA) in black-box setup that minimally perturbs spectrum components and maintains the perceptual similarity in spatial space simultaneously. Our methodology capitalizes on the insight that optimal triggers can be located in low-frequency regions to maximize attack effectiveness robustness against image transformation operations and stealthiness in dual space. To effectively explore the discrete frequency space we utilize simulated annealing (SA) a form of evolutionary algorithm to optimize the properties of trigger including the frequency bands to be manipulated and the perturbation of each band under restricted attack scenario. Extensive experiments on both CNNs and Vision Transformers (ViT) confirm the effectiveness and robustness of LFBA against image processing operations and state-of-the-art backdoor defenses. Furthermore LFBA exhibits inherent stealthiness in both spatial and frequency spaces making it resistant to human and frequency inspection.